| ▲ | magnio 5 hours ago |
| If it gets better and better for the next 40 or so years, will your career exist? |
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| ▲ | debazel 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| If AI continues to improve at the current rate for 40 years then there is unlikely to be such a thing as a career. Manual labor and trades is likely to be one of the last things to go, so the whole "dropout of school and go into trades" crowd may have been more correct than ever, though their original reasoning was not. |
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| ▲ | UncleOxidant 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Manual labor and trades is likely to be one of the last things to go Yes, this is likely true. Plumber & Electrician on existing construction will likely take a long time (relatively speaking) to automate. And even if we end up being able to do it, it could be that humans will be the cheapest option when it comes to a lot of manual jobs especially given that there will be a large supply of unemployed humans in many scenarios. | | |
| ▲ | hnfong 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I wouldn't bet a single dime on that, especially with the advancements in robotics (have you seen the Chinese robots?) Especially if the timeline is 40 years (as opposed to, say... 4.) I have no doubt AI-assisted robotics development would have solved the plumber and electrician jobs in a decade or two. |
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| ▲ | somenameforme an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Lots of people are seeing a future where LLMs will 'knock out' many things that we currently take for value, but not considering our reactions to that. It's akin to how many economists, most famously Keynes, thought increases in productivity (less than we've long since achieved) would lead humanity to a point where we'd eventually only be working for fulfillment and routine, perhaps 15 hours a week. LLMs are going to bring the value of most digital cognitive work to something approaching $0. But all that's going to do is open up a huge vacuum in the economy for other things to become more valued, and for things to then be built on top of the now universally available near-free cognitive work. So the obvious things that will probably increase in value will be stuff done/created in the real world, and creative work. We're also likely on the cusp of humanity having a much greater presence in the cosmos which will likely create the biggest labor boom in human history. I think the time-scale could also be far sooner than some might anticipate. We went from glorified markov chains to 'gg cognitive jobs' in a very brief period of time. Something similar could happen in space going from 'neat we landed on Mars' to YOLO Galactic Imperia Humania, even if the earliest motivations may be as banal as 'We need to get to Europa [1] before China!' This is even more probable given the ability to defacto use this as a modern Works Progress Administration. [2] The countries left on Earth are going to see their influence shrink rapidly relative to countries that begin establishing meaningful grips on bodies outside of Earth. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon) [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration | |
| ▲ | landgenoot 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Don't you think a robot can fix your toilet as well? Why are meta glasses such a big deal? Because they need training data for manual labor. | | |
| ▲ | appplication 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The challenge is not will robots fix toilets but will the economics support it if we end up with most of the world unemployed and without careers. Yes of course we can hand wave basic income and government intervention but reading the room (e.g. last 70+ years of US labor and capital trends) it’s not the most likely outcome, even if it is the most game theory optimal for all. Realistically the outcome of highly capable advanced AI is an economic dark age more than anything else. | | |
| ▲ | UncleOxidant 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I read The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler a couple years back. In it AIs were running ocean fishing fleets. They figured out that robots were too expensive and prone to malfunction at sea, so they would have the robots kidnap people on shore, drug them and then have them wake up on the ships too far out in the ocean to be able to escape and thenm tell them they could get back home if they work. | | | |
| ▲ | hnfong 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's hilarious to read stuff like this. Robots automating everything and humans not needing to work was the stuff paradise fantasies were made of. Sure, it would be the end of capitalism (which, I guess you could describe as "economic dark age"), but people these days have so little imagination what life outside of capitalism looks like that ideal societies sound like a horror story. | |
| ▲ | ptidhomme 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The AI overlords will eventually consider the majority of human lives to be worthless. Let's face it, one day we will need to fight for mere survival. |
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| ▲ | x-complexity 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Why are meta glasses such a big deal? Because they need training data for manual labor. Meta glasses are a terrible example for the case you're making a point about: 90+% of whatever video they'll capture will be trash data. It'd be much more efficient to set up dedicated sites just for producing the very same training data you're claiming they harvest. | |
| ▲ | beej71 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why would you pay for a robot to do it when you could just hire one of the 20 million new plumbers (ex-developers, high school graduates, etc.) who just retrained and entered the field? | |
| ▲ | rob74 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Unlike code, with a toilet it can be very unpleasant and/or expensive if AI gets it wrong three times before fixing it correctly. |
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| ▲ | yuhmahp 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Better to train on our own adaptability, which to an extend includes an advanced understanding of personal mental health | | |
| ▲ | mike_ivanov 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, all we know is that things will change, but we don't know exactly how. So - increase your tolerance to sudden life swifts and learn to enjoy uncertainty. |
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| ▲ | beej71 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If it crashes, there will still be trades jobs but they won't pay enough to eat. What can you charge for electrical work when everyone is either broke or an electrician? |
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| ▲ | tripleee 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Will any careers exist? How do you even plan for that |
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| ▲ | slg 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >How do you even plan for that The honest answer is via politics not education, but this debate is often had in "apolitical" circles that try their best to ignore this. | |
| ▲ | socializer 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They most certainly will, for at least two reasons. First, jobs aren't just about raw productivity, they're also about responsibility / liability diffusion. A CEO managing an army of agents is possibly on the hook if anything goes wrong - for example, if one of the agents does tax fraud or hacks a competitor. A CEO paying an army of employees, even if the employees are there just there to supervise agents, usually has little to worry about. The second reason is that we often prefer humans to do it even if a machine can do it faster / cheaper. Sometimes, it's a status thing. For example, some people will buy Ikea furniture, some will have it custom made by a local craftsman. In fact, it's sort of the hallmark of the upper middle class that you can spend more for that human touch. Cupcakes from an artisanal bakery, private banker, etc. Now, I don't think there's enough people who want to pay extra for human-made software. From the current trends in the industry, my impression is that we don't value our craft, so it would be surprising if others did. For mathematicians, I don't know; it's a bit painful to watch. | | |
| ▲ | esperent 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > A CEO managing an army of agents is possibly on the hook if anything goes wrong - for example, if one of the agents does tax fraud or hacks a competitor This is correct under present day thinking. But imagine the accounting AI of twenty years hence. If it can reliably do the books, reduce and prevent fraud, significantly better than any human ever could, why would you still need the human in that loop? In the present day it's a legal requirement, not to mention a practical requirement given present AI capabilities. That doesn't mean it still will be in the future. To put it another way, if the human is on the hook for the agent, but the agent is proven by a decade+ of statistical evidence to be way less mistake/fraud prone than the human, what's the point of the human there? | | |
| ▲ | socializer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'll give you that the capabilities of LLMs are improving rapidly. Their safety, however, seems to be stuck in mid-2023. They're still easy to dupe and prone to cheating to solve problems. Prompt injection is still a thing, and it's still something we need to paper over with input and output classifiers and other hacks external to the LLM. What we're seeing so far is consistent with the training data being the upper bound for capabilities. They get better at recall / synthesis / reasoning over the corpus, but they don't, for example, acquire trans-human ethics; they're at best as ethical as we are, except not grounded by the fear of consequences. A perfectly-behaved, perfectly-moral LLM is not a given in 20 years, not unless your position is that there's room for unbounded, exponential self-improvement without any loss of fidelity. In that case, we'll probably have problems more pressing than the outlook for accounting jobs. | |
| ▲ | bot403 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm hearing "better" and "less" but not zero and none. The more interesting question is what happens when that rouge/hallucinating agent does commit that statistically unlikely fraud. Who is responsible then? Or is it now no low we just consider it an "accident", pay a small penalty, and move on? |
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| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | idiotsecant 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Some careers that will undoubtedly exist are the 'human manipulation' trades: politicians, salespeople, con artists, religious leaders, basically anyone who convinces people to feed them. | |
| ▲ | paul7986 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Universal Basic Income from all the Ai abundance. Is what Musk touts and since 2016, adding working will be optional. | | |
| ▲ | bot403 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | A dark side of this is that a lot of unethical, deplorable, and amoral people who were otherwise occupied by jobs might suddenly have a lot more free time to make trouble instead of spending 1/3 of their day working for rent and food to survive. Not needing to work is a neat future that might be ahead of us. But it could unlock some new negatives as well as positives. | | |
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| ▲ | cs_throwaway 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| UBI is politically dead on arrival in the U.S. A lot of people put a lot of their self-worth into their work and that’s a good thing that won’t change. |
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